46 Approaches to HRM and L&D are that it is diverse, strategic and commitment-orientated, adopts a unitary (the interests of management and employees coincide) rather than pluralist (the interests of management and employees differ) viewpoint, is founded on the belief that people should be treated as assets rather than costs, and is a management-driven activity. However, the term as used now is often no more than a synonym for what used to be called personnel management. To provide a background to an analysis of the HRM concept, this chapter therefore starts with a brief history of personnel management. The chapter continues with a description of how the notion of HRM has evolved from its beginnings in the 1980s, covering first the concept as initially defined by the American pioneers, sec- ond how this concept was developed and questioned in the 1990s and third, what HRM looks like today. The background to HRM HRM grew out of the increasingly sophisticated approaches to personnel management, which started in the late 1930s and reached maturity in the 1960s and 1970s. Personnel management was rooted in the provision of welfare services and the development of labour management in the earlier